snow white
by koalakoala
Summary: AU. "You look like her, you know," he says dismissively. She sighs, because she wishes she did. For the Starvation forum's monthly oneshot challenge, home. Prim/Peeta.


**A/N:** This is meant to be a serious take on basically a crack!pairing—not to say it's completely irrational. Prim and Peeta are slightly different, but only because they're older and they've been through hell, just about. That said, this was written for the Starvation's prompt for December, home.

[Warnings for sexual references, language, and drug addiction.]

_Disclaimer:_ Suzanne Collins owns THG. I don't I own Anne Sexton's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" either, which is given [incomplete and slightly out of order] in fragments.

* * *

**snow w****hite**

_cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper,_  
_arms and legs made of Limoges,_  
_lips like Vin Du Rhône,_  
_rolling her china-blue doll eyes_  
_open and shut._

* * *

She thinks she looked pretty in the sugar-white clothes ever since she was thirteen.

She imagines that Katniss would straighten her already-straight hat and brush out her curls, like she's still that young instead of three years older. Then she and Peeta would hug her goodbye, because as much as she loved Gale, he was wrong for Katniss.

In reality, she brushes her own hair and straightens her own already-straight hat, white as snow. She kisses the sleeping boy in her bed when she leaves, but he doesn't stir.

Their blankets are a faint yellow. Striped pillows. The wallpaper is full of peeling, pinkorangered roses.

She supposes she should call this _home_.

* * *

_she condemned Snow White  
to be hacked to death._

* * *

"How are you doing today?" she asks her usual patient at the hospital, the sincerity lacking after weeks, months, years of shrugs. He doesn't disappoint.

She carefully inspects the skin of his back, still salmon-pink after almost three years.

"You look like her, you know," he says dismissively, coldly. She sighs, because she wishes she did.

"Not really, Peeta."

"You're prettier, maybe," he says, and the words might be affectionate, teasing even, if only they weren't so…wrong in his voice. Because that same voice used to laugh with her sometimes, used to come out of the TV. _B__ecause…because she came here with me._

It takes effort to stop her fingers from clenching. Sometimes she'll have convinced herself he's recovering, only to kindofmaybe hate him when he never really does. "If you were anything like yourself, you wouldn't really think that," she says, just as coolly.

He shrugs again.

She really hates that.

* * *

_Bring me her heart, she said to the hunter,_  
_and I will salt it and eat it._

* * *

Haymitch is next, and much easier. She tucks in his snow-white blankets and refuses him any liquor. The shaking is worse this morning, so she sits with him and holds his hand and tries to convince him that taking his medication would be good for him.

He knew _her_. She knew him. And _she_ equals home. Logic. She thinks it might be flawed, but she doesn't care because she's grown to love him anyway.

"How's the kid?" he asks hoarsely, not touching his brightly-colored breakfast. She makes a noncommittal noise, and he laughs.

"As usual, huh?"

"He relapsed again." The words are stiff, and her voice cracks, even though she's said them too many times before. "I was hoping that maybe, this time, he would…"

"You're always hoping," he interrupts, but not unkindly. "Take good care of him, sweetheart."

"You know I'm trying."

He looks at her through unusually lucid bloodshot eyes. "But it's not just for her, is it?"

* * *

_She would ask,_  
_Looking glass upon the wall,_  
_who is fairest of us all?_

* * *

The normal patients instead of long-term are easier. A boy's broken his ankle, a woman is convinced she's pregnant, and so on. It's soothing to do this, to throw herself into everyone else's problems and convince herself that she doesn't have any.

It's only morphling, she tells herself.

She just wants to sleep without dreams. It's not too much to ask for, especially when she still dreams of nooses, three years later.

"I'm home," she calls, at exactly five, locking the door behind her.

Home is supposed to be a black-haired boy with grey eyes and a smile so familiar it almost feels like her reflection, but he doesn't feel quite like it. She pictures a goat—with snow-white fur that was slightly yellowing into off-white. A pink ribbon. Lady. In a tiny shack in the Seam. Maybe you can only have one real home in your whole life full of houses.

"Missed you," he says, wrapping his arms around her waist from behind and pressing a kiss to her jaw.

But they were only together like this after they left District 12, after the rebellion, when everything felt kind of like a newborn baby. Raw and utterly unfamiliar.

"Me too," she sighs, kissing him on the lips.

She just misses home (and _her_) more. Because the truth is, she needs a sister more than she needs him.

* * *

_And the mirror would reply,_  
_You are the fairest of us all._

* * *

Later, when he's asleep and she's supposed to be, she crawls out of bed and finds the syringes hastily stuck in her bag.

Her fingers instinctively find the place on her arm, light blue veins and soft skin, and the needle stings briefly. Like always. It's somehow almost comforting. And then the numbness, the relief of pure nothing.

She curls up on the blank tiles, numbed cheek pressed to the cool ceramic. _W__ould _anyone_ care thisfuckingmuch if she died instead? _It might be selfish, but she's past caring.

It hurts when no one notices the subtle yellowing of her skin, that no one stops to ask, concernedly, "Are you okay?"

Because the answer would be no, she isn't.

* * *

_The birds called out lewdly,_

* * *

It starts with bread.

When she comes in the next morning, he's already kneading the dough steadily, snow-white flour covering his knuckles. "Good morning," she says tentatively, surprised.

"Do you like cheese on your bread?" is all he says.

She swallows. "Sure, Peeta." Even though she'd hated the cheese buns Katniss had loved, and she's pretty sure he knows that.

"Prim?" he says, not looking directly at her.

"Peeta?"

"I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"You know what for," he says tiredly.

She swallows. "Do you need any help?"

* * *

_talking like pink parrots,_

* * *

"No," he says stiffly. For the first time, she catches herself feeling irrationally disappointed at his answer.

She makes a point to eat as many of those digusting cheese buns as possible, later.

* * *

___and the snakes hung down in loops,_  
_each a noose for her sweet white neck._

* * *

"Rory," she says lightly. He turns and looks at her with grey eyes she wishes she had. Grey eyes that remind her of home, kind of.

There's a splash of two tangled shades of tan on the blankets the color of watery lemonade.

_"I love you."_

She feels so guilty it's ridiculous.

* * *

_On the seventh week_  
_she came to the seventh mountain_

* * *

A week later, he's sitting with a newly blank sketchpad and charcoal pencils, hand moving gracefully. He's not drawing Katniss, but she kindofreally wishes he was.

Step one: Subtly hint about previous experiences. But not Katniss. "I liked your paintings, before, of the Games."

"She told me she hated them," he says flatly, pushing a snow-white page and a pencil towards her. "I think," he adds uncertainly.

Step two: Try to avoid the subject of Katniss. In the gentlest way possible. "I'm not her, Peeta," she says. She idly sketches a goat, and the fact that it looks terrible makes the homesickness easier to bear.

"But I don't trust you," he says. "She was trying to kill me. For all I know, you could be finishing the job."

Pencil pressed down hard, he deliberately loops a dark bow around the goat's neck.

Step three: Resist the urge to scream.

* * *

_and she bit into a poison apple_

* * *

"Marry me," he says. "It doesn't even have to be public. Just toast. So I know I haven't—disappointed him."

"Rory," she begins, staring up at the ceiling that kind of looks like a blank easel. Her feet ache.

"You're going to say no?"

"I'm sorry," she says softly. "I can't. I don't—I mean, it doesn't feel very…right."

"So those times we—you didn't mean any of it?" His tone is the worst part, more hurt than angry.

"I—I did. It's just that I think you loved me more than I could love you." She winces, not meaning to say quite that much.

"Past tense." His voice has no inflection.

"Rory, can't we just…can't everything just stay the same?"

He scowls and laughs, more bitter than she's ever heard him sound. "You're so goddamn innocent, Prim, do you know that? Nothing ever stays the same."

They're already broken. She once told Katniss that President Snow would do to Peeta whatever it took to break her. Katniss was her Peeta, and Gale was Rory's. Two nooses, side by side. Maybe that's why she thought, at first, that she might be able to love him.

It's three years ago and she's screaming as her mother pulls her away from the TV, as the floor drops out and she hangs there, kind of beautifully in a grotesque way, because she's _dead_—

She looks at her face in the mirror, and maybe it's the dimness, but she only sees shades of yellow. She is indistinguishable from the sheets on the bed that's no longer hers. She thinks she might look a little more like Katniss now, and she kind of hates it.

Later, the needle stings worse than ever as she sits on the lid of the toilet, and she wonders how exactly he thinks she's innocent, of all things.

* * *

_and fell down for the final time._

* * *

A month. It's his longest record ever of recovering, and she comes in every day expecting and dreading and hoping he'll relapse.

Some days he's normal enough, others he's retreated into a more paranoid version of himself. _B__ut never as awful as before._

When he's himself, she notices, he talks a lot, but never about Katniss. Sometimes Annie visits with her son, sometimes Haymitch. He smiles more, but they're never the genuine ones she'd seen [when he was with her] on their fuzzy TV at what was her home for twelve awful-but-lovely years.

"How are you today, Peeta?"

He shrugs, but it's more to tease her than anything else now. She doesn't smile.

"Prim," he says gently.

"Peeta?" Her voice trembles, her arm aches, and she knows her eyes are bloodshot, almost to the point where she can't see any white left.

"Are you okay?"

The words hurt worse than the weeks of longing to hear them. It feels like blood is leaking from her eyes, trailing scarlet down her cheeks, dripping off her chin. She imagines her eyelashes are red fans.

[But it tastes like salt.]

* * *

_The seven dwarfs could not bring themselves_  
_to bury her in the black ground_  
_so they made a glass coffin_  
_and set it upon the seventh mountain_

* * *

He holds out his arms tentatively.

Without thinking, she clings to him, and guiltily realizes this is as much therapy for her as it is for him now. "I want to go home," she whispers. And she isn't talking about Rory's apartment.

"Me too," he says, chin resting gently on her hair. He's warm and she's freezing and she buries her head in his chest and tries to forget that Katniss probably did this a million times.

"I don't not trust you, Prim," he says.

She finds, guiltily, later, that she's covered in shredded pieces of his skin.

* * *

_so that all who passed by_  
_could peek in upon her beauty._

* * *

Two long months later, she steps off the train and breathes in District Twelve air. Beside her, Peeta picks up their luggage. She tugs her suitcase out of his hand and delicately laces her fingers through his.

She likes to think he's smiling, but she can't bring herself to look in case he isn't.

They move into his house, the one in Victor's Village. His first, behind the bakery, is already taken, and her first is in ruins that no one's bothered to rebuild.

She still feels so homesick, even though it should be impossible, since she _is_ home. Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night, craving the prick of a needle at her wrist, shivering when it's the middle of summer. And he's struggling, too, she can tell.

They tend to skip around Katniss a lot.

So that's why she puts on her sister's old boots and steps hesitantly past where the electric fence used to be. She hates the forest to death, but she follows the simple directions Katniss had told her once, trying not to think about the last time she'd been here, hidden with two hundred other people, bombs raining, ashesashesweallfalldown.

He grins delightedly when she cooks dinner, lamb stew with dried plums and fresh katniss tubers, and she can see how it had been so easy for Katniss to fall in love with him. "I can't believe you made this," he says, and she doesn't miss the nostalgia in his voice. Because they just can't avoid her.

She shrugs. "The lamb stew tasted better when Katniss described it to me."

"You're a better cook than the Capitol, Prim," Peeta says.

There's a warm feeling in the pit of her stomach that disgusts and thrills her. And she's glad he doesn't seem to notice the color in her cheeks.

* * *

_A prince came one June day_

* * *

"Peeta?"

"Prim?"

"I've been thinking, and it might be silly, but…can we get a goat?"

* * *

_and would not budge._

* * *

"You look nice," he says abruptly, as she steps out of her room in her customary clothes. It's her first day working at the fairly new hospital.

"Thanks," she mutters, tugging self-conciously at her blond curls. She grabs her bag and he's standing almost awkwardly at the door.

"I could walk you there, maybe?"

"You sound like my mother," she laughs, and it surprises her by sounding natural.

He leans in, probably to kiss her cheek, but she isn't expecting it and his lips meet hers.

She jerks away, horrified. It's not that she didn't want him kiss her, because if she were honest, she would admit she did. It's more because of the fact that _she_ was the one who had to pull away, and the mantra reapeating in her head—

_katnisskatnisskatnisskatniss_

"I—" He has the deceny to look ashamed, at least.

"I'm _not_ Katniss."

She wanted a goat because of Lady. Does she only want him because of _her_?

"Prim, I d—"

"Justdon't." She says the words as hastily as she can, practically running out the door of the closest place to home she's likely to find.

* * *

_As the prince's men carried the coffin_

* * *

She's seventeen and he's almost twenty-two and he was in love with her dead sister. The last part matters more to her than anything else.

In District Two, Haymitch listens to her story with an frustratingly amused grin. "Well, sweetheart, what do you want me to do? Get up off my deathbed for your boy trouble?"

"You're not dying," she says.

"Wish I was," he says, but she can't tell if it was meant to be sarcastic.

"But…what about, you know, _her_?"

"Katniss is dead," he says bluntly. "He's moving on, and you need to. If it's with Peeta…" He shrugs. "He's a good kid, you know. I told Katniss she could do a lot worse, and it's still true."

She's not trying to rebuild her home out of ashes and corpses, because that's impossible. She's only trying to remember.

"I think I needed to hear that." She kisses his cheek. "Thank you, Haymitch." He laughs and says, "Save that for him, sweetheart."

* * *

_they stumbled and dropped it_

* * *

She touches the granite statue of a mockingjay, wings spread. There's millions of flowers already. And katniss. It would be strange for any other person, but not her. Flowers for a girl murdered because she was a murderer. _I can't build the new Panem beginning with someone who gets away with killing another person, however justified_, Paylor had said at the trial.

_You owe her your lives!_ Haymitch had shouted back angrily. It probably hadn't helped that he was obviously drunk.

And she was sentenced to death, her looking completely indifferent.

_I volunteered_, Katniss had reminded her, later. It was so selfish of you, she'd wanted to say, but it seemed wrong to be angry at someone who was going to die. She'd refused to see Gale. Or Peeta.

_Don't cry for me, Prim._ But it was silly to think she wouldn't. How could she not?

Carefully, she places primroses on her sister's grave.

She realizes she doesn't love him because of her. She loves him because he's _him_, because he hates cheese buns as much as she does and just might love the way she looks in white. She loves him because of their new snow-white goat that's not named Lady.

She loves him because he doesn't exactly remind her of home. It's somewhere to start, after everything.

* * *

_and the chunk of apple flew out_  
_of her throat and she woke up miraculously._

* * *

"You're back earl—" She flings her arms around him, fingers curling in his paint-splattered shirt, and he stumbles back, half surprised, half amused. "Prim?"

"I'm home," she says, so sincerely it hurts.


End file.
